Since 2004, the Italian Province of Genova (Genoa) has participated in a number of projects related to Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS). These have included development of a collaborative work environment released under a FLOSS licence, as well as user trials of Open Office and other software.
Introduction
The Province of Genova (Genoa) is situated in the north-western part of Italy. It is one of the four provinces in the Liguria Region. It contains 67 Municipalities and 8 Mountain Consortia, with a total population of about 900 000 residents on in an area of 1.834 square km.
Two thirds of the population are settled in Genoa, chief town and main city in the Liguria Region.
In Italian government, the Province is a local institution placed between the Region and the Municipality. Its main duty is to take care of provincial community interests while enhancing community development. The Province represents the principal point for economic and environmental territorial planning. It gathers and coordinates the Municipalities’ proposals and participates in the drafting of regional development plans and any other regional plans and policies.
Motives for considering FLOSS
There were a number of reasons that motivated the Province to explore the potential use and development of FLOSS.
Vendor Independence and competition
The most important, according to Mauro Solari, Deputy President of the Province of Genova, was that from a user perspective, “it important not to have only one supplier“; any proprietory software application by definition has only one supplier, the proprietor. Reduced vendor dependence is expected to lead to increased market competition and weakening existing monopolies of certain proprietary software vendors.
Reuse and sharing between PAs
In addition to trying to move away from vendor dependence, Mr Solari says it is important for public administrations (PAs) in particular that they have the ability to reuse software paid for by themselves, and by other public administrations, as well as to share software between PAs without additional licensing requirements.
Access to citizens and local businesses
Furthermore, there is the belief that, in line with eEurope goals of providing universal access to eGovernment services, citizens should not be required to buy specific proprietary software applications for accessing the information and services provided by PAs. Also, the Province believes support for FLOSS can encourage the development of local small and medium software services companies to provide higher value-added support then is possible for local resellers of proprietary software products.
Cost savings
Finally, saving costs on software licence fees was not seen as that important because the Province recognises that initial cost savings may be offset to some extent by initial migration and training costs. However, the Province expects significant cost savings from the use of FLOSS in the medium term.
Participation in EU-funded FLOSS initiatives
The two main FLOSS initiatives of the Province of Genova so far are its participation in two EU-funded projects: ICTE-PAN and COSPA. The former is developing sophisticated eGovernment applications in a FLOSS framework, including a collaborative work environment application MERMIG. This application has been tested at the Province of Genova (among other PAs) and is currently in use in the Province. The COSPA project introduces and examines FLOSS in PAs. In this context, the Province of Genova has initiated a trial migration of OpenOffice. These activities are described below.
FLOSS Collaborative work environment
The Province of Genova is already using the outputs of the ICTE-PAN project, including the MERMIG collaborative workspace environment. This is a FLOSS application made available free of charge to PAs under the MPL licence. MERMIG is designed for users who are:
- Involved in geographically spread working groups
- Dealing with sensitive or multilingual information
- Dealing with budget and travel restrictions
- Need a common information resource
MERMIG is organised around “WorkGroups”, i.e. private workspaces for a group of people that need to collaborate to achieve common objectives and tasks. The environment is fully customizable for any given WorkGroup and the information is restricted to members of this specific WorkGroup. Public access to information can be enabled if desired.
Members of a WorkGroup usually play different roles, such as Chairman, Contributor, Secretary, and
MERMIG offers the functionality of creating different access classes for particular needs of administrations. Its “What you see is what you have access to” user interface ensures that only those features and information allowed by an individual user’s access profile are visible.
The user interface is currently available in English, German, French, Italian, Greek, and additional languages can be easily added.
The MERMIG platform has been installed on a dedicated server at the Province of Genova, and is being used for a pilot application (the tendering process) as part of the ICTE-PAN suite. Mr Solari intends that ICTE-PAN be used throughout the Province, after a successful trial.
Trials of OpenOffice
The EU-funded COSPA project involves the trial of various FLOSS applications at participating PAs, as well as support, training and evaluation of costs and benefits in relation to alternative proprietary solutions.
As part of this project, the Province of Genoa has installed OpenOffice on about 150 desktops running Microsoft Windows. The users of these desktops were already familiar with Microsoft Office, and were each provided 8 hours of training to use OpenOffice. According to Flavio Rossi, from the Information Systems Service of the Province, the installation was completed by internal staff. The Province has internal IT staff of 10, supporting about 1000 employees in total.
In addition to OpenOffice, the desktops also have Microsoft Office running – so it is for the moment a trial in parallel to the existing systems, rather than a migration. Although no particular difficulties were reported by users in learning or using OpenOffice, according to Mr Solari, “people don’t seem to be using OpenOffice much”. As there is no compulsion or incentive to stop using Microsoft Office, Province staff are reluctant to change their daily work practices.
There are also specific problems experienced with OpenOffice, particularly in relation to Microsoft Office’s lack of interoperability and use of proprietary data formats. While OpenOffice can work with MS Office’s files, Mr Solari sees a particular problem translating larger, complex documents from MS Office to OpenOffice, as well as in porting custom applications that have been designed to work with MS Office (e.g. in WordBasic).
According to Mr Solari, systems used by the Province usually come with Windows and MS Office pre-installed, but older systems are not upgraded, unless they are running MS Office 98. The standard desktops in use have MS Office 2000, and new systems have Windows XP and MS Office 2003 pre-installed. Mr Solari said the Province is waiting for OpenOffice version 2, as it is “supposed to be very good” and will also have support for a database equivalent to MS Access, which the Province uses al lot.
Other FLOSS applications
According to Mr Rossi, in addition to MERMIG / ICTE-PAN and OpenOffice, a number of FLOSS applications are being used or tried out. Linux is being run on a server, and in addition QCAD is being tested instead of Autocad. Proprietary software is currently used for Geographical Information System (GIS) applications but the Province is testing the FLOSS GIS application GRASS. For graphics, they use the FLOSS graphics editor GIMP and prefer not to provide users with Photoshop; similarly, they use a FLOSS pdf creator rather than Acrobat Writer.
Future plans
With the emphasis on citizens’ access to government services, the Province plans to use only OpenOffice for publication of documents to its websites. It plans to make this obligatory for its new web portal to be released next year.
Based on the current trials, after 100 users are regularly using OpenOffice, the Province plans to migrate to OpenOffice on all workstations within the organisation over the next 2 years, at an estimated cost saving of about €240.000. According to plans, Provincial Professional Training Centres will act as Open Source training centres and promotion points of FLOSS philosophy among citizens and businesses. According to Mr Solari, these training centres, though owned by the Province, use external consultants as trainers.
Mr Solari says that migration from Windows to Linux is much more difficult, but would like to promote cheaper FLOSS-based alternatives to Windows in schools, which receive computers from the government with no software pre-installed and thus can achieve significant cost-savings through the use of Linux and, for example, the Sun Java Desktop system.
Further Information:
MPL Licence
Genova Presentation at FLOSSPOLS conference
Paper Versions of this Case Study
Open Source Use in Genoa (PDF)[160 Kb]
© European Communities 2005
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The views expressed are not an official position of the European Commission.
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